Congress makes headway on issue regarding club approvals

Yesterday, at the 2nd period Congressional Meeting in the theater, more ground was covered on the club approval issue that was raised by the Oracle last week. The Oracle had reported on the misconduct of club approvals, where clubs were being rejected approval on the grounds that they needed a 2/3 majority, while the ASB Constitution required only a ½ majority. ASB President Zia Absar, presented her drafted amendment, which proposed that ASB handle club approvals as an internal matter, instead of having Congress (randomly selected students of 2nd period classes) vote on them each month.

ARTICLE XCHARTERING PROCEDURE FOR CLUBS AND ORGANIZATIONSSec. 1: Charters must be approved by a simple majority of the Executive Branch in order to utilize school facilities and to have a representative seated in the Council of Presidents.Sec. 2: All school clubs and organizations must be chartered by the Student Government and submit a budget. If an account of any organization is inactive for one school year, the organization must re-charter the following school year in order to maintain their account;Sec. 3: Chartered organizations may utilize the office facilities and the services of the school bookkeeper, and shall have a representative seated in the Council of Presidents;Sec. 4: Approved chartered organizations must re-register for the following academic year no less than 20 school days prior to the end of the current year;Sec. 5: All clubs and organizations must have a certificated faculty advisor and officers;

An open forum about the proposal revealed opinions about the issue from ASB advisor William Blair and congressional representatives.

Blair: “The only change [with the amendment]is instead of the entire conference voting on clubs, just ASB would do it.”

Ethan Giles: “So the point of this amendment is to improve the acceptance rate and speed up the process to make it faster and more effective? And it would be a quicker registration process for the clubs?”

Blair: “ASB meets once every week in a formal business meeting, and Congress meets once every month or every 5 or 6 weeks. Another benefit is… the process will be a little bit more intense. Right now we have about 20 clubs, and we’re going to have to rush through them to get them approved, and sometimes [in Congress]people are not voting, not paying attention.”

Blair: “It seems like right now a lot of clubs aren’t being approved and it’s kind of frivolous, kind of random, which clubs are accepted and which clubs aren’t. It would create that more professional process [that]is important as well.”

Minh Ngyuen: “Is there any way that students could come to the meetings and have a say? Right now it seems very isolated… not to say that we don’t want to have clubs approved, we just want to have a say in the quality.”

Absar: “We would present them to you guys, and if you have any concerns about why you don’t want them to be a club, then you can come talk to us.”

Blair: “We’re going to vote on this amendment next month. Right now, the way it works is during second period, [is that]once a month we all get together and vote on all the clubs, and if you want to keep it that way then you can vote against the amendment. During second period in ASB we can’t really have random people coming in because most people have classes and can’t attend. If we want to have students to have a voice in club approval, we have two options. One is to keep it the same as this, and the other is to put all the club approvals up in a special election to the mass voting, or something akin to that. But that would be a different amendment that we would present next month.”

Next month, all second period representatives will be voting on this amendment to determine the future of the clubs approval process. Keep in mind that as representatives of their class, they should be consulting their classmates on this important issue, facilitating conversation whether the amendment would be beneficial or not, and voting with their peers with the future of MVHS and its students in mind.